No visible means of support

Interesting interview with Janet Radcliffe Richards, about whom I know not much except that she's a philosopher who has written a book about Darwinism. (Anyone know whether it is any good?)

'I began to notice after some years that all the most interesting arguments I was producing took a particular form, which I am now trying to get more and more systematic,' she explained to me in her north London home. 'Essentially it depends on establishing a direction of onus of proof. So, for instance, if a policy causes some clear harm, you start with the presupposition that it's unjustified until proved otherwise, and challenge its supporters to defeat that presumption.

'This doesn't sound as though it could possibly get you anywhere,' she admits, 'because your opponents can just come back with counterbalancing arguments. But it's quite astonishing, once you get going in practical ethics, how many of the familiar justifications are straightforwardly spurious. It's often not a matter of their depending on different moral premises, or making different judgements about the evidence. It's that the premises don't support the conclusion, or are manifestly invented for the purpose of reaching the conclusion.' ...

'The thing which gives so much scope for getting the philosophical needle in, is that often the real reason we have for our beliefs is not the one we give - even to ourselves. What tends to happen over and over again in the history of argument is that you get a radical change of world view, but people still have quite a lot of ideas left over from the old one. So they try to fudge a rationalisation of the old beliefs in the new language. This is what happened in the case of women. The old view was that men and women were designed to be in their traditional roles, in the same way as rulers and commoners. Then people began to accept the liberal idea that everyone ought to be able to rise as far as their talents would let them, instead of staying where they were born - but they still thought men and women should stay in their separate spheres. So they tried to justify this in ways that sounded compatible with liberalism. But, as Mill showed, the arguments just didn't work.'....

This description of proper method - a.k.a. socratic method - is quite clear and helpful, I think. Keeping your eye on the prize means keeping faith in rational argument while keeping on with good old genealogy of morals. Reflective equilibrium plus moderate hermeneutics of suspicion. Because faking up reasons for stuff is not some incidental curiosity of moral psychology but practically the heart and soul of practical reasoning about ethics. No, seriously.

Comments

[Cosma]

I read her book on Darwinism, which I thought was quite good, and her The Sceptical Feminist, likewise. (I still remember a sentence from early in the latter: "Some men are quite as capable of logical thinking and scientific investigation as women.")

[Neil]

The book on Darwinism is an Open University textbook, so it is unfair to expect too much of it. The idea is to introduce traditional philosophical topics (free will, ethics, etc) and see to what extent Darwinism is relevant to them. I read it thoroughly because I was writing a book on Darwinism at the time. I hated it. She is far too unsceptical about the claims of evolutionary psychologists, and rather unsophisticated on evolutionary biology (these things tend to go together. Paul Griffiths or Kim Sterelny, for instance, don't buy EP hook, line and sinker because they understand that what evolves is phenotypic plasticity). You, John, would probably like it more than I did, since I seem to recall that you are a Steven Pinker fan. Pinker's better than most, but the Blank Slate goes off the deep end now and again.

[Kent]

"Because faking up reasons for stuff is not some incidental curiosity of moral psychology but practically the heart and soul of practical reasoning about ethics. No, seriously."

I agree completely. And, of course, the same applies to politics.

Take a typical person who says "I'm voting for politician X for reason Y." The Y will change a million times -- and every Y will seem equally good -- before the X changes!

Other ways of saying the same thing (more or less):

(a) "A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest."

(b) Wasn't it here on this blog that I first heard about Nietzsche's claim that conservatives "add lies" to justify things they believed long before they had reasons to believe them?

The difficult thing is that, even knowing this about oneself, it's still difficult to keep oneself honest! The ability to see the truth about the world is a lifelong task, because our illusions are all too enjoyable and easy. (I think of Iris Murdoch here.)

Ahh, anyway. I'm not sure where I'm going with this. But thanks for your post.